Parcharidis Iraklis

He was born in the former Soviet Union in 1956. He studied at the Artistic Lyceum of Cocant and at the School of Fine Arts in Alma Ata (1976-1980). He continued his studies in the Postgraduate Painting Department in the Pedagogy Academy of Moscow (1980-1982). He lives and works in Athens, Greece.

Solo Exhibitions

2012 Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, Athens, Greece

2009 Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, Athens, Greece

2007 Galerie Monohoro, Athens, Greece

2006 Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, Athens, Greece

2002 OPUS-39, Nicosia, Cyprus

2001 Anemos gallery, Athens, Greece

2000 Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld, Germany

2000 OPUS-39, Nicosia, Cyprus

1998 Titanium Gallery, Athens, Greece

1996 OPUS-39, Nicosia, Cyprus

1996 Gallery of Nafplio, Nafplio, Greece

1994 Gallery of Nafplio, Nafplio, Greece

1994 Ersi’s Gallery, Athens, Greece

1993 Image, Athens, Greece

1993 Greek-french Institute, Athens, Greece

1991 Aenaon, Gallery of Athens, Athens, Greece

1990 Cultural Center of Mykonos, Greece

1989 Arte-Tallin-89, Tallin, Estonia

1985 Abinsk Gallery, Russia

1983 Abinsk Gallery, Russia

1977 Gallery of the Kazakh State Arts Academy, Kazakhstan

Good Morning!

We all have a square that we feel is also our own. I am at Iraklis Parcharidis' square where it is snowing coal dust, as I believe my dear friend Nasos Theofilou would say. Coal dust that sketches and draws the people who pass by, but also those that have already passed, the memories and the recollections, as the scene empties and fills again. The theatre of shades, the puppet show, the street theatre, the commedia dell' arte, the carnival people and the stilt walkers are the protagonists of a dramatic feast that takes place in the wide setting of the square.

Blurred, vague but nevertheless classic images from years of depression but also years of hope at the same time. The walk of the passers by, the slow and stable course of the bodiless rniserables to the preretirement ideal destination, each painting narrates and describes the theatrical performance of an entire day.

Iraklis Parcharidis' painting has managed to make me become a video-art fan -God forgive me- and I aspire to videotape for twelve continuous hours each painting of the artist, so that I can pin the viewers down to watch a moving picture that they themselves will invent and feel.

The lyrics of an anonymous poet come in my mind and lips:

At the little square of the island in the corner and under the pine tree, an old story is being narrated by a man with a white waistcoat.

About travelling with, the dark ships of anticipation through the unending time, about a sad and empty love in a turmoil of unbearable pain.

The wind takes the words and the letters in his song over the waves, sounds made out of laughters and cries become his peculiar poems.

A man with a white waistcoat whispers at nights to the stars, with a white flower in his collar and a white book in his hands.

The wind takes the words and the letters in his song over the waves, sounds made out of laughters and cries become his peculiar poems.

Iraklis Parcharidis, Elegiac Painting

"Bodies? Say it again. Bodies. It’s unclear, it can't be heard. Ask the touch. Does it remember? Has it ever pronounced that word?"
Kiki Dimoula, "The Adolescence of Oblivion"

In an era where images rule everything because the visible has become an oppressor and only what is visibleexists, painting seeks again to accomplish its old mission: to mediate through the visible to the invisible and to claim once again the soul of things while establishing above all, their body. If Duchamp through a Dadaistic negative attitude condemned the painting of the retina as vulgar, painting in our days, under certain circumstances, undertakes a crusade against the vulgarity of what is visible and claims the Epiphany-Theophany of what is hidden behind the image of the body, that is longing for its immortality. For these reasons we contempt decorative painting, for these reasons we renounce the painting that is ashamed for its body, hidden behind abstract concepts and smart tricks. This is why we search for the painting of revelation, which is the most difficult!

IraklisParcharidis, away from the neo-Greek descriptivism or the ready-made polychromatic emotions, artic­ulates a visual rationale, meditative, architectonic, and elegiac. His subject is the human existence in a world thatconstantly loses its human characteristics. Such an intention would easily tempt someone to use optical gabbles or melodramatic clichés. The cultivation of the painter however, as well as his mentality protect him fromsuch narrow paths. His poeticism, through his clever drawing inflicts the formation of particular symbols: the figure, the house, the city, the tree, the group of people, the primordial landscape, and the mythical nature before the arrival of people. Dimoula would say it differently: "I am an amateur human being. How could I form better complains? Because painting in our days mostly exists to defend complains".

Through these visual symbols, his sets his work as if in a scenography of a text, the painting reason of which has not yet been written. A theatre without words... we could say that compared to his previous exhibition (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, 2006) his paintings investigate fields and situations within a twilight zone. The materials are now more direct-earthy, stucco, charcoal, acrylic and e.t.c - and the result is less chromatic-conspicuous and more imposing-elegiac. Like a blurred wall painting of Roubliev, that has not been discovered yet,Parcharidis is painting in a monumental way and allusive chiaroscuros, the rope-walkers of a life that has been deformed, the myths and the miracles of a religion which has no more believers. In a time of torturing images and the lack of bodies -in other words the orphanhood of desire- Parcharidis sees the world with eyes half closed like the old hagiographers. In other words, he dreams the world and discovers it wandering in the edge of his soul.

In 1870, in Saint Russia with the encouragement of critic Vladimir Stasov, the new artists abandoned the capital and wandered at the vast steppes, in order to learn about the silent lives of the deprived masses. Because of this, they were named "Peredvizhniki" wanderers. Parcharidis is a perenvisnik like Ilya Repin with references that range from Russian, high morale realism, to the imaginative painting of Chagall. His adventure in painting all these years, has taught him something: that one can think better with his eyes closed. And that one sees better through misty eyes...